After baking and tasting six or seven varieties, Cutter and his crew settled on organic baby bear pumpkins.

“The flavors are very intense, sweet, slightly squashy,” said Upslope head brewer Alex Violette. “It reminded us of pumpkin pie the most. That’s kind of what we were going for.”

Just a couple of years later, Upslope’s Pumpkin Ale won a coveted gold medal at the Great American Beer Festival in the field and pumpkin category, making it one of the most sought-after beers of the fall.

The Boulder brewery — which packages exclusively in cans — increased production of the pumpkin beer fivefold this year and for the first time is selling it in limited quantities of 16-ounce-can four-packs.

So what makes it so good? While some brewers rely only on spices or canned pumpkins, Upslope uses freshly harvested pumpkins.

In the past, employees baked the pumpkins at home. But this year Upslope employed a commercial kitchen to bake and process the pumpkins, and supply the brewery. (In all, it expects to produce about 150 barrels).

The 7.7 percent alcohol-by-volume ale also includes a custom blend of six spices from Savory Spice Shop in Boulder. The spices are carefully blended to minimize astringency, a risk with cloves and nutmeg, in particular, Violette said.

“We also wanted it to taste like a beer first,” he said. “There is going to be a little astringency from the pumpkin added, but at the end of the day it’s not cloyingly sweet or a dessert beer you can only have a few sips of. You can easily drink a couple of pints and not be burned out.”

The beer will be available until the end of October.

Colorado has more homebrewers than any other state in the union, judging by the state-by-state membership totals in the American Homebrewers Association — and it’s not even close.

Colorado has 5,782 members, California has 4,697 and Texas has 1,983.

Gary Glass, director of the Boulder-based American Homebrewing Association, cites the state’s several homebrewing shops, multiple homebrewing clubs and deep history of craft beer.

Colorado is also home to the Great American Beer Festival each fall. Because AHA members get first crack at tickets and access to a special session, it’s likely many people sign up for that privilege alone.

The homebrewing association has about 33,000 members, and the nation’s homebrew stores pulled in about $306 million in revenue last year — up 24 percent from the previous year, Glass said.

And since 2005, the demographics of the typical neophyte homebrewer has grown younger. Almost half of new homebrewers are under 30, Glass said.

The hobby is following the trend of going local, he said.

“The go-local movement across the country has people supporting their local businesses and local farmers and farmer markets,” Glass said. “And it doesn’t get any more local than brewing (beer) yourself. It’s a fun hobby, relatively inexpensive compared to other hobbies, and the end result is beer. That is a pretty big incentive right there.”

The brewery, which specializes in barrel-aged and specialty beers, will add two 60-barrel fermenters and one 30-barrel fermenters (more than doubling its brewing capacity) and a fully automated bottling line.

“We thought there was a big gap in the national beer market for high-end beer,” co-founder Xandy Bustamante said earlier this year. “There are all these beer fans and beer geeks looking for something new and different all the time.”

Jeremy P. Meyer was a reporter and editorial writer with The Denver Post until 2016. He worked at a variety of weeklies in Washington state before going to the Walla Walla Union-Bulletin as sports writer and then copy editor. He moved to the Yakima Herald-Republic as a feature writer, then to The Gazette in Colorado Springs as news reporter before landing at The Post. He covered Aurora, the environment, K-12 education, Denver city hall and eventually moved to the editorial page as a writer and columnist.

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